Perfect for Three Bachelors

by Janice Hamilton

Over the years, several people told me that our cottage, which is next door to St. Brendan’s Chapel, was once owned by the Catholic Church, but I didn’t know whether that was true. The house has three small bedrooms and three bathrooms upstairs, and what used to be a maid’s room and bathroom off the kitchen. As my mother said, it would have been perfect for three bachelors. Perhaps it was used as a summer vacation home for priests.

Last year, I visited York County registry of deeds office to see what I could find out about the property’s history. That meant researching two lots: lot #6 with the house, and the adjoining lot #8 with the garden, both described “on a plan of the Isaac Bickford Pool Farm divided into lots in April 1861 and as corrected in August 1864 by Dominicus Jordan.” (This plan is referenced in many early deeds at the Pool, however, I have yet to find a copy of it.)

The earliest record I found showed that, in 1865, Biddeford businessman Thomas H. Cole and two partners sold lot #6 to Nathaniel McBride. McBride sold it to Emma Estelle Goldthwaite in 1900 for $130. Emma and her husband Wright Goldthwaite must have built the house because, in 1914, they sold the lot, with the building, to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland for $3900. This suggests the City of Biddeford assessment database, which says the house was built around 1880, is incorrect – unless the house was built elsewhere and moved -- but it does prove that the church owned the house.

Postcard of Main Street. St. Brendan's has not yet been built (it opened in 1916) and our house, on the right, does not yet have dormer windows at the back. 

In 1928, the bishop sold the house to three people: Frances M. L. Foster and Laura Foster Robbins, of Biddeford, and Cornelia (Brookmire) Gillette, of Chicago. It was sold and resold several times over the next 20 years, until 1948, when Julia Foster Bartlett acquired it.

Julia and her husband, Edwin Bartlett, who is still remembered at the Abenakee Club for his knowledge of croquet rules, were from Milwaukee. The Bartletts came to the Pool in August and rented the cottage to my parents each July. In 1963, when the Bartletts decided they were getting too old to make the trip, they sold the house, fully furnished, to my parents.

The adjoining lot had a very different history, and revealed a big surprise: the City of Biddeford auctioned it off for non-payment of taxes. I discovered why in a 1913 newspaper article.¹

In the mid-1800s, lot #8 on the Bickford plan belonged to Daniel Holman, owner of Highland House, one of the Pool’s first hotels. As well as being a successful businessman, Deacon Holman, as he was known, was very religious.

Holman died in 1878, leaving his extensive land holdings at the Pool to his wife and, after her death, to his grandson, Walter Starkweather. Holman’s will stated that, if Starkweather had no children, the Maine Missionary Society was to inherit his property forever. According to the newspaper, Starkweather was childless, but the Maine Missionary Society was not keen on the inheritance. Since the land could never be sold, and was considered unproductive farmland of no value, no one even bothered to pay the taxes on it.

Frederick T. Brown of New York City, owner of the Sea View Inn, won all of Holman’s Pool real estate at auction, paid the taxes owing to the city, and paid $1,000 to the Maine Missionary Society to clear up the title in 1883. Brown died in 1898 and his heirs sold part of lot #8 in 1948. The new owners sold it to Julia Foster Bartlett later that year and she sold it to my parents at the same time as she sold them the cottage.

For more than a century, 42 Lester B. Orcutt Blvd. has had a unique history, but the names of many of those who owned it, including Isaac Bickford, Thomas H. Cole, Daniel Holman, Frederick T. Brown and members of the Foster family, also appear in the deeds of many other houses in the neighbourhood. 

Note:

1. “Last Will and Testament of Daniel Holman; An Interesting Document That Has Caused Much Trouble; Strange Instrument That Has Finally Resulted in the Brown Estate Possessing the Pool Property,” Biddeford Daily Journal, Dec. 8, 1913. On microfilm at the McArthur Library, Biddeford.